Trust Your Gut

All right, Greg, today we're back in the original studio, I guess we should say, not on the road this week when we're recording this one. But it's been a busy couple weeks, and we're getting ramped up for some more travel coming up. And we've got a bunch of topics we want to get out on the podcast. So, for today, is sort of a, I guess, elaborating on the first episode of "Sense Make Versus Sense Make," is the way I look at it.

But what we're getting into today is kind of intuition and trusting your gut, and then a few other things about how that works and information and intelligence, and then also, how do I train for this stuff? And so, again, you wrote something a while back about this, about emotion and cognition. But you had a bunch of great examples in there to kind of what a lot of people think of is the problem: How do I sort of see the person who's just odd and doing something odd versus this is the person that's going to attack me or my family or the situation I'm in? So there's— because that's the seemingly gray area that people don't understand real well that we really address in our training especially. But I thought this was a great article that kind of highlights some of that, and then we can get into that.

So, if you wouldn't mind sharing that with everyone, and then we can kind of jump into the discussion from there. I appreciate it. I also appreciate everybody tuning in; hope you love the new format.

Brian, as you said, this is from Lessons Learned 42, which was probably 2018 or so. And I'll do my best recalling it. So it starts off with, "Just the facts, ma'am." I was browsing through a social media site to locate a recent posting attributed to one of our Arcadia Advisory Board members when I came across a photo of a London, Ontario, Canada, police vehicle, and it had Arabic writing on the vehicle's graphic package. The Gulf Arabic writing was on the right rear fender near the Canadian flag. And under the photograph was a rant—an absolute rant—written by someone contributing their post to the same social media site regarding this graphics package.

And the author couldn't fathom why a Canadian police vehicle would be host to Arabic writing. And they wrote words to the effect: "The two official languages of London, Ontario, Canada, are English and French. Why then is it necessary to put Arabic writing on the police vehicles? Who are they catering to?"

That's a lot of hate and innuendo. I'm already getting pissed off at this guy.

Yeah, like, sniping, catering to people in the community. I don't know, sorry. I'll let you, let you go ahead.

But the author never acted as though they knew what the Arabic words meant or had done any research. And I remember wishing silently that the author had engaged their curiosity in a more meaningful way rather than further fomenting anger by implying an unreasonable conclusion. The author never included that the Arabic writing literally said, "Police." The author never added that the London, Ontario, Police began putting "Police" on their police vehicles in five different languages years ago in an attempt to be inclusive, reaching more members of their already culturally diverse community.

So, I called and confirmed this by contacting LPS (London Police Service) Media Officer Constable Sandha B. And Sandha stated that the languages originally chosen were Vietnamese, Chinese, Polish, French, and Gulf Arabic, because those were the most commonly used languages in London, Ontario, at the time. Sandha advised me that the LPS was planning to add Spanish in the near future. So, what if you don't know what you're talking about? Take an "E" and stay out of the conversation. That part's impossible for people to do, by the way.

I think so, too. Even reading it now, I'm smiling.

The author's misguided attempt at levity, coupled with the fact that they appeared tone-deaf to community involvement, seemed staggering to me. Coupled that with the fact that in the Information Age, the answer was just an email or a phone call away. The author made no attempt to research their conclusion before printing negative commentary on their perceptions. And not all information rises to a level of intelligence. Further misinformation or the lack of credible information or missing information can create a data chasm that may prove unfixable.

And I'm not attacking the author's First Amendment right. I'm merely saying that when you play fast and loose with words, you may write something unintentionally inflammatory. In many instances, the most fundamental level of basic fact-checking would have informed the author, thus preventing the author from writing something which would foment hate or violence where no such malicious intent was envisioned. So, let's take a look at a situation when not sharing information could prove deadly, and I call it "The Ruse."

Just before Christmas, my dear friend contacted me with an interesting tale. He was an early Combat Hunter senior instructor and a plank holder, and he related to me an incident that happened to his daughter while she was away from home. His oldest daughter is now a freshman at a prestigious — she's graduated since — at a prestigious Michigan university. And a few days ago, she was headed back from the library to continue studying with her friends at an all-female dormitory. She noted a man unknown to her repeatedly swiping a common access card (CAC card) in an apparent attempt to enter the dorm. Now, this is problematic, whether from a security standpoint or an ethical one. A male shouldn't be entering the female dorms, nor should a male student or civilian be in possession of a female student's common access card. So the female freshman confronted the man and asked him what he was up to.

That alone is the tough choice. Should she have called security first? Should she have taken into account the time of day, the possibility of accomplices, the locations of surveillance cameras? Should she have minded her own business? Each of these choices flashed through her conscience. And when she confronted the male, the male seemed surprised and caught off guard. He responded by asking the freshman what the name of the dorm was, now acting as though he was just merely lost and confused. And the freshman told the man that he was attempting to enter an all-female dorm. The man then said he was sorry and hurried away.

So the female student follows the man for a short time, noticed that he walks directly to another female-only dormitory on campus, and once there, resumes his card-swiping behavior. Now, fearing that crime was afoot, she calls her mom and dad. Her dad's a retired veteran police officer and security professional, and her mom's a veteran police officer, retired, and a registered nurse.

So, back to the class: "Should I stay or should I go?" If you're ever in a similar situation, compare the Most Likely Course of Action (MLCOA) with the Most Dangerous Course of Action (MDCOA). Then compare them against the environmental baseline within which you find yourself. If a female student compromises campus security by giving her access card to a male student or a civilian, that action has potentially dangerous implications and spirals, and must be reported. If a student or a civilian is in a position to witness suspicious activity by a male student or civilian at a female-only dorm or vice versa, those actions may be precursors to criminal activity, and they must be reported.

So, let's talk about the explanatory storyline. Now that you've discussed the MLCOA and MDCOA implications of your observation, try to create an explanatory storyline for your perception. Base your conclusions on reasonableness and likelihood. You don't have to be a terrorist or criminal to consider what type of behaviors they would exhibit if they were engaged in a nefarious activity. If a male found or stole a common access card and someone knew, somehow knew, that that card belonged to a female student, how would that male figure out which dorm the female resided? A simple way would be to try and swipe the access card at every female dorm until the door opened. So, this seems to be what the freshman might have witnessed. So, coupled that with the fact that the male modified his behavior, then seemed lost or confused, and the fact that he quickly left the scene, added to the suspicious nature of the initial observations. Finally, the fact that even though discovered, the male continued to try the card on another female dorm makes the explanation likely enough to be true, and that warrants police or campus security intervention. Armed with this logical, reasonable conclusion, the female freshman called the police. The entire process only took a matter of minutes.

So, let's talk about old Simon Bar Sinister. John Norman Chapman searched for unlocked or propped-open exit doors on campus, not unlike the man that drew this freshman's attentions. Surveillance and unlocked doors made John's work much easier. Moms and dads don't want to send their kids to a college or university known as a hunting ground for serial killers, so they tend to leave that information off their brochures. John Chapman's chosen profession was serial murder. John specialized in abducting, torturing, raping, then murdering young females, specifically those on or around college campuses. John was known as "The Co-Ed Killer," "The Ypsilanti Ripper," and these murders occurred from 1966 through 1969. Because Chapman's victims included females from both the University of Michigan and Eastern Michigan University, fear spread that the murderer might be a college student. Both universities and the neighboring cities and their law enforcers were besieged by parents, students, and the general public wanting answers. They wanted security. By 1969, Chapman's abductions appeared to increase in frequency. Although John's murders predated the common access card entry system, John knew how to fish for unlocked or unattended doors and then use subterfuge to isolate his victims. John needed access to his female victims. He insinuated himself into situations where he could be near them, watch them, and learn their habits before he abducted them. John Chapman killed a female in California and six females in Michigan before he was captured.

The young female freshman I introduced to you wasn't a part of John Norman Chapman's reign of terror. It wasn't part of her in-briefing either when she started university in 2019. It certainly would have made her even more suspicious of the man she saw attempting to enter the female dorms. Her decision to call the police wouldn't have taken so long.

Information can help advise your situation. Intelligence: the difference between information and intelligence is huge. Simply put, information is knowledge you possess about a particular factor or circumstance. In order for that information to be considered intelligence, it has to be processed, investigated, and turned into credible, actionable information, more than mere facts. In the first section, a misinformed writer stirred emotion when they failed to verify the information they were sharing. In the second story I shared with you, by processing information and creating likely storylines, my friend, his wife, and their daughter were able to determine that a man's conduct was suspicious enough to warrant informing the campus police.

In my final section, I'll demonstrate how the lack of sharing important information and intelligence during training can create a situation where you're unprepared for action, even though you're armed and ready for action.

So, let's talk briefly about the White Settlement Church shooting on Sunday, December 29, 2019. Forty-three-year-old Keith Thomas Kenan from River Oaks, Texas, stood up in the West Freeway Church of Christ in the city of White Settlement, Texas, and shot two people to death with a shotgun before being killed by an armed church security volunteer. Kenan was a damaged human struggling with demons, according to his wife. He had a long criminal history, including arson, illegal weapons possession, theft, and assault. In 2012, a protection order was written, and Kenan's former wife, Cindy Glasco-Vogel, wrote that Kenan was "violent, a paranoid person with a long line of assault and batteries, with and without firearms. He is a religious fanatic," this is her quote, "and says he's battling a demon. He's not nice to anyone."

So, according to witnesses, Keith Kenan was wearing a fake beard and a wig as a disguise and had on a three-quarter-length, long winter-style jacket inside a Texas church. This made parishioners uncomfortable, yet they said or did nothing. According to church elder Mike Tinius, Kenan's manner of dress and behavior attracted the attention of church security. They said nothing and did nothing until Kenan started shooting. One person stated, and this is in quotes, "The gunfire came without warning," even though I saw the video, and each of you likely saw Kenan's behavior and mannerism before the attack. (And Brian is going to have that video in the episode.) Anyone with human behavior-based threat training would have seen him as a threat and dealt with him long before he stood up and pulled out this three-foot gun. So, it also has graphic content when you see the video.

So, having never seen the gunman in church before isn't evidence of anything. You can't use that as probable cause. But wearing a three-quarter-length winter coat into a Texas church while wearing a beard and wig disguise, that is. A 38-year-old female sitting behind Kenan stated that both she and her seven-year-old daughter were so uncomfortable with the fact that Kenan was wearing this fake beard and wig in church that she said she noticed him the moment he sat down. The female stated that she observed church security personnel move near the man and sit behind him, presumably due to Kenan's strange behavior. The female added that Kenan's behavior was so distracting that she couldn't sing or pray — that's what she loved at church most — and she felt that something was "just not right about him." So much so that she and her husband discussed that they were going to move to the other side of the church once communion had concluded. Folks, we call that a proxemic push. More on that later: atmospheric shift. The female added, "I should have listened to my gut."

Information can come in many forms. The FBI is working to identify the shooter's motive. That's a waste of ink. I feel dirty for writing it. Motive never matters. If the folks in the church would have been trained to identify intent rather than motive, lives would have been saved. It's ridiculous to hail someone as a hero in a shooting where two people died. If the damaged human known as Kenan wanted to die, he was free to do it himself without involving anybody. He did, however, choose a venue that afforded him a great chance to act out violently: what we call a soft target. People will argue that the church was in fact a hard target; security was able to kill Kenan before he killed more than the two people he did shoot. That's hollow solace for the family and friends of 64-year-old Anton Wallace, a church deacon from Fort Worth, and 67-year-old Richard White from River Oaks, Texas. Trading cops' lives for criminals or church security lives for parishioners is a zero-sum game; nobody wins.

The gift of time and distance can negate the surprise and fear that an ambush attack relies on. True, you have no idea what your reaction to an armed gunman will be until you're in that situation. But if you undergo realist training that pushes you through muscle memory and includes cognition and an emotional component, you're much more likely to act in a manner that will ensure your survival.

So, training for the real event: Armed security personnel with muscle memory training can recall and repeat actions based on procedural memory, gleaned from consolidating a single specific motor task—drawing a weapon, pointing and shooting a weapon, reloading a weapon—into a memory by repeating that action many times. But that falls short of being a successful survival mode. You must also add motor learning. Now, motor learning is adding the level of complexity necessary to use that muscle memory skill, reloading the firearm in an appropriate response at the correct time, based on the cues in your environment. Taking the transient nature of a muscle memory and compiling on how and when creates this neurochemical bond in your brain that will create a bridge between your training and rehearsal and the anticipation or preparation of that motion or memory. That, too, falls short of a complete survival strategy. The final essential component is adding the emotional-cognitive behavioral modules to your training.

The human brain uses a complex set of logic and emotion during critical decision-making. During periods of high stress, procedural skills like muscle memory give way to emotion-based survival chemistry. And unless your training includes the addition of emotional memory components and cognitively real injects (instances) where your fluid intelligence, your reasoning ability, your critical thinking skills are challenged in a realistic environment during an intense encounter, you can be great with a firearm and still lose a fight. Without such additional components, you may still succumb to fear, uncertainty, anxiety, and surprise, all of which come with intense encounters.

Humans feel their environments. We have largely evolved past understanding intuition or gut feelings that used to warn us of impending danger. Our electrochemical neurotransmitters attempt to warn us of dangers through the synthesis of catecholamines (the hormones created by your adrenal gland: dopamine, epinephrine, norepinephrine), and they couple with cortisol and then are released into your blood when you're physically or emotionally stressed to prepare for action. Call it your "gut instinct." It's a chemical, it's not just instinct. Simply being armed or training to shoot at paper targets are never going to prepare the human brain for the real encounter. If you plan on relying on armed security, decide also to train the brain. If not, the encounter will come down to luck, speed, and odds, and they'll go to the actor who can best control that surge of adrenaline and fear until the dust and the brass settles on the floor. You can be a hero if you stop a deadly encounter before it starts. You can also learn how, because your safety is largely your responsibility.

Now, Brian, I hope I didn't butcher that too badly. But folks will be able to see that and the photos.

So, yeah, again, just like all these articles, we're putting those on the Patreon site that has all the information. You've got the photos in there. It's organized then for you to go back, because there's a lot to pull out of here, Greg. And you hit on a number of different topics. And yeah, I think folks listening can see why you started with this story of Sean's daughter at college, seeing this guy going in. That's already, people are like, "Oh man, I'm thinking about their kid." But then she had never heard of it in that area. And there's been actually a bunch, you know, in that area too, in Michigan and Wisconsin, for serial killers. And like, had she been given that sort of, "Hey, this one thing happened on a college campus. I don't want to scare you, but this is why it's important to pay attention to these things," I guarantee she would have been like, "Oh my God, that's exactly what they're talking about!" So there's that part.

And then we go into which, the church shooting in Texas, which we talk about in in-person training, and I'll leave a lot of that discussion to there. But there, same thing, where you had people going, "Man, this is odd. This feels weird." And you had a guy—that guy was his name Jack Wilson, I think, that the head of SKAR (Security, Knowledge, Awareness, and Readiness) down there—did a great job. The guy was like an NRA instructor. Like, this was an awesome member of the community training people forever. And even they all knew something was up, and they didn't, but they still, even as professional as they were, waited until he started. Okay, until the shooting was on. It's like, well, at that point, it's too late on how we look at things.

But I want to start with this idea of intuition. And then we can get into a bunch of stuff, because the explanatory storylines and how you broke down, well, basically, building probable cause on the guy entering the building in a sense. But also the fact that you and I were talking about motor learning and training, when we were briefing people at FIGHT JCTD (Joint Combined Training Development), and not all good instructors still understand what that means. So that's a great thing that we tried to throw in this episode as well.

Yes. And part of that is even how it's talked about. So it's like a language issue, it's a lexicon, it's a semantic issue on a lot of things. But that's important when you're getting into this. So, let's start with intuition, Greg, because that's a big thing everyone says, "Oh, I've got really good intuition," or, "I trust my gut." The idiom says, "Hey, trust your gut," which I always tell people to do: Have the confidence. If something feels wrong, one, it likely is. You don't know why. Don't jump to an unreasonable conclusion, but stop, look, listen, smell, take a step back. That's your brain.

So, can you explain a little bit—we don't have to go into a ton of detail—but the science of intuition? Because there's a science; it is science. And that's why we yell when people say "gut instinct" or "the hair on the back of my head" or all these other things. Because when you explain it in a manner that's non-scientific, people have a hard time believing that it's true, that it can happen to them. I'll give you an example. So, intuition is the ability to understand something immediately without the need for any conscious reasoning. A thing, something that happens that no one has to think about; they consider immediately from instinct and unconscious reasoning that this is going on. So, a synonym for that is a "sixth sense," which I detest that term, or ESP, or clairvoyance. Now, those terms are much closer, right? That's actually in this thesaurus if you look it up. I'm having a hard time putting words together, so...

And Brian, the opposite of that in the same thesaurus is intellect. So I pose the challenge that when we say intuition, again, it's a scrum with words. You just said that with certain words. And what it is is, it's really the electrochemical neurotransmitters to your brain trying to send a distant early warning, based on things that it's putting together that you're encountering in your environment, and you're not putting them together just as quickly. But it already has. And it already says, "Hey, you may not remember this, but based on the information that's coming in right now, last time this happened, it was a sandwich." And so those types of things are going on. Now, how do they manifest themselves? Well, cortisol. Cortisol gives me the butterflies in my stomach. My erector muscles, based on my hypothalamus, heat up my neck, and all of a sudden, I feel the hair start standing up. So of those indicators, the gut instinct are really scientific, pseudo-scientific ways of explaining scientific theories and postulates.

Yeah, and it's an easy way. Everyone's had that feeling before, like, "Something didn't feel right." We all, when you say that to anyone, they understand what that means. But there's actual science you can learn, and you can become—you can get better at becoming an intuitive thinker and knowing what that means. So, real quick, because intuition isn't just that feeling we get, "Hey, something seems off," because that's your amygdala for the most part, and your primitive brain, sensing your environment, taking in all of those senses. So, your sight, your smell, your hearing, everything that's going on, that the feeling or mood. And you even brought up a little bit about that in the article. And but so we have that on board as a human survival system, right? That's kept the human race alive for as long, for despite our best efforts, we're all still alive today because of that in general.

And then, another way people talk about intuition—because I just want to hit it up because it kind of gets into the training aspect—because my next question is, "Can I develop my intuition?" But you can, I'll let you explain that. But what I mean is, if you ever see someone at the top of their game, maybe in their sport, or, you know, a basketball game, and it's the NBA finals, and someone makes an incredible play where they don't even look and they pass the ball to their teammate, and they get it, and they're barely even looking at them, they get the ball because they've worked and trained together so much and gone through so many repetitions. They're making decisions based on all of this incoming information. Now, it's within a finite context of a basketball game, right? If someone starts shooting in there, they're not going to even hear it probably. But the idea is, so you can develop that within a given context like that, and I think everyone knows about that if you become a master tradesman or craftsman or something, or you're an estimator and you can walk up and go, "Yeah, I think this is going to cost about this much," and after a while, you get so close to the specific amount because you have all of that intuitive knowledge and tacit knowledge you developed.

Now, however, when it comes to things that we're talking about here, and those survival systems going, "Well, is this something that's going to escalate," like the recent, I know it just happened this week, the shooting in Kansas City for the Chiefs Super Bowl party. Like it rose to this level. It was a beef between a couple people, and they started shooting at each other. But all of this comes together then: Can I get better at using my intuition for something I'm not an expert in, Greg, like something outside of what my area of expertise is?

So, there's three things that you brought up that are amazing. I want to go back on them. And folks, you've got to listen: When Brian talks, he's not just asking a question; he's setting the stage, he's priming for a question because he knows so much. The first thing is, take a look at the Kansas City shooting video yourself and watch how many people had no idea that it was going on. You'll hear the shooting, then you'll see the shooter, and you'll actually see the weapon. And you'll see some people walking hand-in-hand, looking back over their shoulder, not even sure that it's not part of the process. That's the first thing: recognition that you're in the moment that really helps, right? Anticipating that something like that might happen.

The second thing is that you're saying, and I must reiterate, that no matter how well-trained you are in one thing, it doesn't cross the street to make you better at another thing. And we'll talk about that in just a minute: how muscle memory and memory are two separate, distinct concepts, and building one doesn't make you a critical thinker. So let's talk about that in a minute.

But I want to say this to you: If I rehearse the Stations of the Cross and catechism, and I go over and over and over it with the nun or the parent or whoever is doing it with me, that doesn't make me understand Jesus any better or any other book in the Bible. So what I'm doing is, at that skill, at that time, I'm doing the appropriate steps in the appropriate order to some standard, either a written or a demonstrated or an implied standard. If I understand how to switch gears and do the clutch and the brake pedal better – I was lucky enough to meet Jackie Stewart and drive with him in Detroit when the Detroit Grand Prix was in town, and he was saying, "Brian, I never knew," and I was just sitting there going, "Oh my God, I'm going so fast," on streets that weren't designed for this, right? So I'm thinking of survivability, and he's just looking. The idea is though, that didn't help him understand the combustion engine. That didn't help him work on coefficient of frictions on tires. Those are completely separate skills, and all are based on sense-making, problem-solving, and ultimate decisions based on critical thinking.

So what do I mean? So, "memory" means cognitive memory: your ability to encode, store, retrieve information. "Cognition" means thinking, "metacognition" thinking about thinking. So, cognitive memory literally means learning and then consolidating memories and then being able to recall them when you need them. That's the key. So, we know working memory. Short-term memory is now called working memory by all science. I can hold information temporarily, very limited time capacity. Now, long-term memory allows me to store information over an extended period of time, and based on its strength or weight, sometimes forever. This is where PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) and some other things come from.

Now, cognitive training means I can use a whole bunch of related knowledge skills. For example, I can apply outside of the Stations of the Cross and the gear shift and choosing the right putter, which is all stuff that you were talking about. Understanding distance on a golf course is the same as taking the right swing at the right pitch on a ball field. So, in sports, these things work very well. But now cognitive goes in a different direction, and cognitive says, first of all, there's general knowledge—things that everybody knows. Then there's explicit memory—facts, evidence, experiences that might be known to everybody, right? But these are things that, depending on my job, are a little bit different, right? They're a little bit more classified than the general memory: water's wet, sky's blue. Then we have episodic—those personal experiences that I have on my journey. That's what makes us the unique little snowflakes, right?

So then you add to that the implicit. So, implicit memory is literally the hardwired stuff that we come with, right? So they're constantly running in my unconscious, and that's what gives us those gut instincts, right? The amygdala going, "Hey, based on previous information, it's a tyrannosaurus or a shooting!" I mean, you don't care which, right?

And like you said, with all those, because you've been brought up with like PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) or something, or anything trauma-related like that, that's going to be one—it's going to be a go-to for our brain, and it gives you sort of—it can give you a corrupt file folder in a sense, where you're getting that sort of amygdalic reaction situation where you don't need to have that.

Brian, you're spot on. The impact is that now I'm getting an incongruent signal. All incongruent signals in humans lead to anxiety. So now, if we understand implicit, let's go to priming. So, priming is enhanced preparation based on prior exposure. So, you've had a similar external arousal, and all of a sudden, you want to be able to categorize that so you can do it from a song, a scent, a memory, an atmospheric, right? All of those different things. And this is what people keep trying to say is "stress inoculation." Look, there's already a word for it. Use the word. Use what science and the voyage of discovery have given us, because you can't stress inoculate. But that's a whole different, a different, yeah.

So, now let's talk about less cognitive memories, what I like to call procedural memory, and that's what scientists call it, too. So, "muscle memory" is procedural memory. And the funny thing is that if you understand it, your brain can't retain a memory, or a muscle can't retain a memory. Those are all retained in the brain. So why does that matter? Because motor skills apply to a very limited, specific set of skills: a task, sewing, playing a musical instrument, doing a very specific sport, a relating skill, catching, touching the base, and then making the double play, right? Pitching, batting. And repeating any task with a detail or a precision is going to get you better at that task, but it's not going to prepare you for surprise. It's not going to prepare you for unplanned occurrences or consequences. So the type of training that does is critical thinking training, which is when we emotion-base and cognitive-base. And that's what the problem is, Brian, is that we keep saying that it has to be an amalgam of them, and we've said it since the beginning, and everybody else focuses on the easy, and the easy is the procedural, right? The steps.

Because I can extrapolate a series of steps from that incident and then train in those steps in that manner, and one, I'm learning something, and I'm getting better at the skill set, but I'm, there's sort of this false equivalence that that's going to help you in that manner.

But you know where that comes from? That comes from playing the piano. And first, it's just the scales, and then now you learn a song like "Chopsticks." But guess what, Brian, now all of a sudden, where have I begun to tell the story? Now we're doing the themed, "The Love Story." And guess what? I rehearse it, and I practice it. Now I can do it without the music, I can do it anywhere, and I can do it in a crowd and make it sound really good. That's wonderful because it takes thought and practice, and now it becomes automatic, and you can execute it skillfully. But it doesn't help you apply that to the next song.

Well, okay, or a guy with a gun. Yeah, that's not going to help you play the guitar. Now, it'll give you a better background knowledge for maybe you can then read music. Yeah, and maybe you can learn it faster than me because I don't have the background of the piano. But you already do because it's closely related in terms of music. But, you know, because I've done that, because I play guitar, and then someone sat me down like, "Hey, this is how you make a chord on the piano." And I was like, "Oh, just like that!" Yeah, these are the notes. And so I could play a couple songs just learning those basic chords. And be like, "How the hell do you learn to play the piano?" I was like, "I can't play the piano like, I know what a chord is, so you showed me that on here, but I'm not playing Beethoven." You get what I'm saying? Like, it's clunky, but I understand music theory a little bit. So, I can do that. But that's all within again that sort of context.

And so that, you know, that intuition, that intuitive feeling that people get, it ties into, because we talk about the brain and the human processing system, it's this is information. It's processing information. Information could be a sense, it could be a smell, an observation you make, it could be the article you read in the paper. Information is everywhere you scrolling through your Facebook or Instagram feed. It's just information constantly getting blasted at you. And you know, in there you said, "Not all information rises to the level of intelligence. Further misinformation or lack of credible information can create a data chasm that may prove unfixable." But we kind of talked about that, but it goes back to this ties into what you're talking about, building an explanatory storyline. So it ties in together.

I love the example of the guy in the college dorm trying to gain access. And then you had Kenan down at the Texas church, and you had all of these indicators, all of this information screaming, and that's actually now risen to the level of intelligence. And then you brought this down as a—and you did it with the college campus example—of sort of building this explanatory storyline for your observation. So, and you did it again in the Texas church one. But explain this explanatory storyline, just because, for anyone listening, this is what your brain does for everything you do.

You go, "That's exactly what your brain does," right? And that's what we got because this ties back to the first episode about sense-making. It goes, "Oh, the milk is sitting out. The insurgent must have been up having a bowl of cereal and forgot to put it away." I have to account for why that is not in the refrigerator when I walk in the kitchen. Right? There has to be a reason. "Oh, okay, Michael's getting stuff out for dinner," you know what I mean? Whatever the situation is, your brain is constantly doing that without even you realizing it in the background. So, can I take that conscious process in a sense and make it conscious for a while so I can get it better? Get better at creating those so I can understand the situation because this is where those things went wrong. No one created the correct explanatory storyline, and they waited to react. You know what I'm saying? They waited for the story to play out, and they didn't have a comparison, so they didn't know it went sideways. So, you were again as an idiot savant and an expert in human behavior, you just came up heavy on the heavy.

That's me, okay.

But listen, when you were talking about the milk and the explanatory storylines, you as a human have the ability not only to play it backwards but to play it forwards and anticipate the future: "if-then, if-then." So, what you're talking about an explanatory storyline is what would likely happen next. So, if your insurgent walked by, you go, "Hey, you forgot to put the milk in the fridge," and she said, you know, "Wrong person," and just kept walking to go out that place, wasn't me, then. And then all of a sudden, you go, "Okay, it's my wife." All right? Those types of things mean that I can go to historical perspective: "Last time I saw milk out, it was the insurgent." So it's like, in the moment, "Wow, milk shouldn't be sitting there. I hope we're not getting robbed." And in the future, "Wow, it's going to taste great tonight. I think we're having lasagna." You see what I'm trying to say? So, you're bombarded with information.

So, let's first go to information. Information: broad data, facts that are received about a particular subject, event, time, space-time, whatever. And then intelligence is processed information. Simply stated, intelligence is processed information. If you had curds and whey, they're not cheese; you have to process them to make the cheese. It's a completely different taste and feel and smell until it's processed, and that's exactly the difference between information and intelligence. So, intelligence is knowledge or insights or special things that I derive from information through analysis, through synthesis and interpretation, and comparison. So, what you're talking about is, if I'm going to do an explanatory storyline, I should have in my mind a couple of things about anticipation: "If this is true, then what should I expect to see next?" So, I see two people that clearly are in an argument, and then I anticipate they're in an argument. So, when I open my door and I put my foot on the ground, I now hear them yelling at each other in elevated voices. I also notice they blade their bodies towards each other. So, these indications, these pre-event indications – and again, they're not pre-incident event indications of violence or danger, they're merely cues in our environment. So, when they come together in a certain fashion, just like a recipe, guess what you got? You got a wonderful wedding cake that you can ice and remember the taste forever and ever. But the risk is rushing into that and making an unreasonable conclusion by not using that explanatory storyline. So, if I'm a cop and I only get the information from dispatch, and I roll up and pop out of my car and start taking charge of the scene without taking some information from the environment, the personnel, the sights, the feels, the tastes, the proxemics, the atmospherics, the physiology, that's vis-à-vis the biometrics between those folks, then you know what, Brian? I'm racing, and I'm going to exceed my headlights, and I'm going to crash into a tree because the road turned to the right and I never saw it. That's what the problem is with only doing one thing during our training.

So, let me tell you about MLCOA (Most Likely Course of Action) and MDCOA (Most Dangerous Course of Action) quickly. Randomness can't exist in our universe because we have predictable rules. So we don't understand enough yet to anticipate outcomes that aren't likely because we're not there yet. So, the only thing that we have and what we teach in our hegemony and pedagogy are "most likely" or "most dangerous." We have situations of danger or situations of opportunity. You see how easy that can be when we do a training event.

And you hit it right there on why a lot of people—like no one at the church intervened sooner. You know, why and why that happens all the time. And we see that is because we have the 99% of our file folders, let's call them, our experiences, those comparisons we're going to use, are for the most likely thing. Okay, this guy is, you know, he's got a drug problem, he's homeless, he's this—like he comes to this church because he'd been to that church before. Exactly. And so, it's unlikely it's going to be something bad. Same thing with Sean's daughter, like, "Well, it's a college campus, there's guys on here." You know, "What could it possibly be?" You know what I'm saying? And we don't ever use that comparative baseline because a lot of people even say, and I'll even go as far as the guy, the head of security at that church—same thing. He's, this is his world that he's in, and this is not a knock on him at all whatsoever. I'm saying put yourself in his shoes if you're listening to this podcast and going, "Well, yeah, this is odd. Let's keep an eye on him." You know, now I've got this person, I think. They even said, "Hey, when we go get communion, we're not going to go sit back next to him." She was so scared, she couldn't sing like she normally does. Like these are such powerful indicators in your environment.

Now, you're going to say, "Well, you didn't think it was possible for them to put that together." That's fine. I don't, they don't, you don't need to at that point, right? But what everyone wants to do is like, "Well, what am I supposed to do when these things occur?" And that's obviously dependent on the situation and what your role is. Like, back to the church shooting, the female is like, "Okay, well, I'm going to move my seat." That's a great option. This guy, the guy working security, "All right, I need to continue to watch him." But it's like there's this sort of fear of intervening or doing something, and but it's not really part of it, it's denial, right? Part of it's like, "Well, this is so unlikely to happen here," because it's true, it's very unlikely that you're going to go to church and someone's going to come in and shoot up the place. In fact, think of how many times that happens in a year. So that's the, whatever the numerator, and then the denominator's how many times in the United States do people go into church on a weekly basis and add that up? So you're talking about something so statistically rare. But we don't ever attribute value to those observations because we fall back to what we typically see or know, right? And that's what it becomes: it's this, "Well, it's probably nothing," even though all this stuff. So, our own sense of denial and our prefrontal cortex will override our primitive survival systems because we, because we don't ever see it. When we don't see it, touch it, taste it, smell it, if you haven't studied it, if you haven't seen someone killed before, if you haven't seen a dead body or crime scene or this, or one of these attacks, it's not real to you, and it doesn't become real in there. And so it's very, very hard to get your brain to go, "No, this is something that could happen," even though you see it on the news all the time. You go, "Well, I'm just going to the gas station. I've gone to the gas station 10,000 times in my life, and nothing's ever happened. Why would something happen right now?" And that's actually a very logical way to think; that's not an illogical or, you know, at a very simple level, that makes sense to your brain.

And so what I'm getting at here is, loosely, but you just explained how to conduct an explanatory storyline and explain the significance of those observations in the environment, right? You just did that with the explanatory storyline you talked about. So, can I sort of get better at this? And how do I get better at this? How do I, away from even this episode, to go, "Okay, how do I do that?" You know what I'm saying?

You shined a light on a very important thing. And when people hear me talk about other scientists, I am not a PhD, right? Don't ascribe to be, don't need to be, because I've got more knowledge and experience than thousands of them lined up to try to heckle me. And the problem is that they continue to use theory, and they don't use research. And the research they do use is flawed, and I'll give you why it's flawed: because every research citation and the recent thing that I just read on LinkedIn, which is a good thing, it's a good idea that, "Hey, these same motor skills and learning, all this other stuff are going to," and then I see 10 citations from sports. Police work and sports are not the same thing. So, when you give me research that's conflated to a point where I'm, look, I can make the connection myself: "If then, if it's true with sports, then it's likely that there's some elements of it that'll cross over to police work, but not all elements." And the critical elements are, look, I don't remember anybody, except in a movie with Bruce Willis, during a football game, pull out a gun and shoot one of the defensive players, right? Maybe that's coming in America, right? But it's not the same. So if it's not the same, stop treating it as the same.

Second part of their research, they're spinning their tires in neutral, which is hard. They're doing the neutral slam, getting RPMs up and then dropping it from neutral into drive by quoting stuff we all know, and that makes us go, "Wow, this must be good research!" Look, every one of them ends with the same thing when they don't do practical examples. And every one of them says, "More research necessary" at the end of the study because they need that next grant. They need to be the next guy in line. Well, your brain does that instinctively now. Why? Because it's so long, "flash to bang," from the time that you had to run from those threats and the dinosaurs and fight other tribes that you've gotten dumber. We've all gotten more relaxed. So now our brain is on this cycle of, "Well, maybe I need more information."

So, this is how you do it, Brian. Let's shine the light on the church first. When is it likely that you'll ever be in a church where you'll see people dress up in costumes? And I would argue that Christmas, because they're doing the Nativity scene. Easter, because they're going to have Lazarus, right? And Jesus coming. Okay, maybe, maybe Easter. Now, they might change colors outside of the church, but actually have actors in costume in that church, I would say just Christmas. Now, I can't say all religions every time, but I'm pretty gosh-darn sure of this West Interstate Baptist, okay, that their church is going, and they're doing it on Christmas. What would I also like to see or likely see? A full parking lot, not all year long. Okay, not every church, but around the holidays and Easter, Catholics or what.

So, what I'm saying is, there's a certain number of lenses, and not all communication or information is weighted equally. So, sitting in this church now, and knowing that the church has security, likely tells me that there's been breaches of security before, and this church is trying to be proactive. Knowing that there were security members that were armed in plain clothes amongst the participants, the people, the churchgoers, whatever they're called now. Parishioners, that's the word I was searching for, buddy. A lot of talking, not a lot of saliva. If you imagine that there are plain-clothes cops with guns in and amongst those people, that means that they had a credible threat, a previous credible threat, or knew there was a likelihood, knew or should have known, that there was going to be an armed assailant at one point. Now, there's also historical precedent set by other church shootings. So, all of those create the perfect storm. So, what do you look for in a perfect storm? You hear thunder. You know that there's flash to bang on lightning. You know that the clouds are going to come in. Brian, when the guy came in and sat down with the fake beard and the mustache and the three-quarter-length coat, he fit their own profile for the perfect storm. They under-reacted because they didn't want to overreact and scare a bunch of people. I don't know what was in their mind at the time. But I knew once he came up shooting, now they knew, "Okay, probable cause has been satisfied." I posit probable cause existed the moment that he came into the church dressed in that outfit, and that outfit was completely anomalous and incongruent for the circumstances in that church at that time and at that place.

Okay, but here is what I see as a typical response to something. I'm going to make a graphic, and I'm going to call it "Pre-Attack," and I'm going to describe Thomas Kenan exactly how he carried out that attack. And this goes back to, we jumped into detail in the last couple episodes about kind of prototypical and template matching and heuristic thinking. But that's what everyone then focuses on. Okay, well, he's got the trench coat and he's shifting around and he's doing this, and that's for the most part completely unhelpful to put it. But that's what we want. We want that checklist of those things to look for. But you don't—one, you don't need it. And you don't, like, we're not prosecuting someone here in trial. We don't need very detailed artifacts and evidence that have been collected in a scientific manner and drawn to a reasonable conclusion and documented and shown here, right? You mean, for an intervention strategy, to witness that? We don't. This is in the moment. It's your world. And we even got into that, you know, last week, with the rage and randomness of it. It's an interaction between you and the environment. Like, anyone at any time, especially if you're in public, can walk up to someone and say, "Hey, how's it going? Hey, what's going on here?" Exactly. Like, you don't—it's this idea that you're just a bystander or you're just, you're just in this scene. It's no, it's your world. You can interact with it. You have the ability to affect that and change it. When you jump into the ball pit, you push all the other balls away, right? And they move out and they push against other balls and they load up on the other person that's in there. Whatever that is, like, you get to do that. And there's this, like, this disconnect between that information and intelligence and action that we feel like we need to have some sort of certitude. Like there's a definite, and it, there's, that does not exist ever. It exists when, in hindsight. In hindsight, you go, "Well, here we go." But you don't need that. There's uncertainty in every single thing. There's uncertainty in us getting up and recording this podcast. The Wi-Fi could drop off. Your animal friends can come storming in from behind you. I think they're circling outside. I've heard a lot of odd noises at this point. So, like, Crow is in on them, too. There's all those things. And there, but there's degrees of likelihood.

But then everyone says, "Well, I want it to a certainty. I want to know what are the green, yellow, red indicators? When do I get to that?" And this, this is the problem is we try to put a rigid structure or format over to a—on top of a nebulous situation that is constantly in flux, right? So we're trying to put rigidity to something that is always moving and up and down and floating and rising to, "Okay, this is something," and now it's not anymore. And so, it's hard for people to conceptualize that, even though I would say that's how everything is in your life. Everything, that's how science is, that's how math is.

That's what I'm trying to say, too, Brian, and I think we're on the same page, but I want to throw another, look, I don't intentionally try to piss people off sometimes. Sometimes it's a fluke, it's a hat. And I am, I'm kind of like Uncle Buck with a different letter at the beginning, right? And I want you to think of this: every time I see something like that, I become skeptical. And then I read something lower down where they cite an article that they're not a part of, or they put in there a "peer review." Okay, well, that's great, but you know what? That's not scientifically tested and vetted. That hasn't gone through the experiment process. What you did is, that's like a jury of your peers. Your peers all go, "That makes sense to me." That does not make it science. And my problem with that is that what happens is the interpretation of that is why when I go to a meeting, people think we're all on the same level.

And so I'll talk to a personnel, I'll go, "Well, with police work and this and my background and whatever," and I'll go, "Hey, that's absolutely amazing. How long did you work the road?" "I didn't work the road," or, "I worked the road for seven years, and the agency I worked the road in had four officers, and it was in, you know, rural BFE (Butt-F***, Egypt)." And then, or what happens is I say, "Okay, well, I've seen it in 53 countries and been able to test it on the road in combat zones and outside the wire." And then they say, "Okay, well, the other thing is, it's not just me talking, it's not anecdotal, Brian. Our hegemony and pedagogy, every word from every that we've ever taught, has been tested and vetted by rigorous study by experts." So, the idea is that I love the idea that they're putting out those charts and those graphs, but a chart and a graph held up against a person isn't going to make you decide faster or better. And this is why our reliance should be on factual data, artifacts, and evidence to make a reasonable conclusion at the moment, not at some future court proceeding, exactly as you said. And the standard should always, always be demonstrations of intent.

Why would somebody attempt to conceal themselves from other parishioners in a church? That's suspicious. Why would a person continue to use a CAC (Common Access Card) improperly only at a women's dorm? Then when they moved, it's not random. Went to another women's dorm. So the problem is that many times we're faced with these single points of information, and we failed to link them together. That's the beauty of MLCOA (Most Likely Course of Action) and establishing an explanatory storyline. Is when we look at information and we allow it to flow on its own space-time, settled where it will, it always shows us a logical pattern. If we force that, look, I say this again: The reason our cops are getting killed is because we've got lights and sirens on the car, and we're spending so much time hurrying to the scene, we're spending no time with critical thinking. Now, do the cops need those? Yep. But are they being misapplied? Are we running to view our own homicide, Brian? Are we failing to connect the dots way back here so that when we get up on home plate and they hand us the bat, we're going to miss the cue from the pitcher? And I say yes to all of those. And I say that's because our training, look, our training didn't have to be really good way back in the day when I only had a key to a key box and a truncheon. Okay, when things got out of control, I went over and called more people, and they sent everybody. Our training didn't have to be that good. Now it does. And you know, and sometimes, obviously, we have sort of a, as humans, we have sort of a negativity bias, and we only watch and consume information, especially on the news. Like, they don't just come in and say, "Hey, here's nothing happened over here today," or "Things are okay." The one we used to love, "The Squirrel," the water squirrel. I love that thing. Yeah, I used to see, I remember seeing that at the Chicago Auto Show as a kid. That was the greatest thing ever.

But, and so, because there was a recent one—and we talked about it briefly—it barely, I don't even know, I saw it on the news a few weeks ago, about a kid. And this was a kid in like Ohio or somewhere that, you know, he had a friend, and that friend was on transmit and going, "Yeah, I'm going to shoot up the school, and don't tell anyone, and I'm going to come after these people. I'm going to do this." And he's like, "Man, I don't like this," and he went and told his dad. And it was even like, "I'd rather, you know, he kill me than go and kill everyone in the school." And then they obviously reported it and stopped it. This kid had a plan, he had a gun, he had all this stuff, right? So, it was there. And so this 15-year-old kid had zero training in any of this, right? He had none. He was just a normal human being who went, "Well, this is odd, and I should tell someone." And then, and what if they had intervened and it had been nothing? Okay, good. Like, what's—meaning, what's the danger in any of the situations we talked about if it was a false positive? You know, we went and interviewed Kenan, and he didn't have a gun on him, and he was just, he's got some mental health issues, and he's embarrassed that he's bald or something like that, and everyone in here has beautiful hair or something, you know what I mean? Or the other kid, like, "No, I was just angry at this. I don't even have access to a weapon." I don't—what happens? There's no—or the guy on the college campus, he's like, "No, I work for the company that is installing new card readers next month, and I got to test out the master key." Like, what's wrong with that? That's the lowest caloric intervention. It's going, "Hey, what are you up to? What's going on over here?" Because you're shining light on it now. Now what's happening too, and you know me, I'm always asking and listening to the aid of others, right? So, I would say, "Hey, listen, this man is making me suspicious," in a loud voice. You know what I mean? That's the type of thing we're talking about. And it doesn't take you spending thousands of dollars going to a course to learn how to fire a weapon while you're arched back under a car, at moving targets. Those are wonderful, and I applaud anybody that does that, and it's a lot of fun, okay? But I don't remember when that ever came in handy, you know? And I can only speak to six years in the military and 27 years on the road as a cop, Brian. I never encountered that. And I was kind of in some places that I might have seen it, and so were you, you know?

Now what I'm saying is, why do we do that then? Why, why is that a default? Anxiety is right next to fear, right? And anytime that we see that, we think, "Oh my gosh, I better train for this because now I need new, I need to start burying in my yard. I need to buy, you know, stockpile toilet paper," because it makes me, because I don't understand these situations. I get anxiety, which leads to fear, so I have to somehow manage that. And if I do this thing over here that people are talking about, I feel like I have more control over the situation. If this were to happen to me, I feel like I have this capability now, and it's not going to happen to me. But that doesn't actually address the situation. It doesn't actually help. It makes me feel better.

Makes you feel better because you can point at something. And what you just discussed is why certificate mills put out certificates. It's not to demonstrate for your file that you're certified for something so a new employer can pay you more. That's not what happens with us. It's that some, and very rarely, there's a governing body that we all agree with that sets a high standard. People have to, like medical exams, right? I like the fact that I don't have a guy that's got, you know, I worked at a jerk chicken stand, and that equivalency allowed me to be an ophthalmologist, right? You still have to do what, though? You have to pass the written test, but then you have your residency, you have to sign. Yes, that's it! That's your practical debate of, "Are you, are you, okay, you're certified, are you qualified, though?" And you're not. And the problem is that people equate those as their equivalent, and they're not equivalent. And why we worry about that is that you're going to get somebody that is that has, look, my personal information doesn't enter into our coursework. I use stories of encounters that I had to start the discussion on things, but I don't go, "Well, in my opinion," because my opinion at the end of the day does not matter when it comes to the science of what we do. So, then that, let's sort of tie that back to, kind of, what the main point of the discussion was about intuition and trusting your gut. You know, that's the biggest thing that there's a whole lot going on behind that. And yeah, you might be wrong, you might have read the situation incorrectly. But you might not be. So, what's the cost of not doing something or not intervening and not asking a follow-up question? I mean, that's what I'm saying, I'm sorry, but avoiding a shooting or a homicide or a mass casualty event.

We don't, we don't like to be wrong. I mean, this is the thing, is human condition is we hate, but at a very literal sense and at a neuroscientific level, your brain does not want to be wrong, because "wrong" means you, at a primitive level a couple hundred thousand years ago, "wrong" means you're dead. "Wrong" means you didn't, and I may be a threat to my tribe, and they're going to kill me. So it's not that I'll just die alone and on my own by a mistake.

I get ousted from the colony. Exactly, exactly. And that's our fear that's still with us today. And that fear of being wrong, I think, is a powerful reason that leads to denial. And, you know, your brain wants the answer before you get to the end of the sentence. It doesn't want to come up with something blank and say, "I don't know." And so when you have that approach of trusting your gut and your intuition and but then acting upon it and saying, "Well, what's the lowest calorie thing I could do right here?" You know what? What can I, can I prove right, or lock the door?

Exactly. Ask a question. The lowest calorie is ask the question: "What are you doing here? Who are you? Let me see some ID."

You're exactly on to something, Brian. Look, when I said my opinion-based testimony is taken at a lesser standard unless I'm being sworn in as an expert witness in what I know. And I know human behavior better than anybody. Okay? So, if you and I were standing on a subway and it was going sideways, and you and I started running, well, that's the kind of gut instinct that the people around us should weigh very heavily, and they should be running, too, because we know more than they do in that situation. But if the same thing were true and we were talking about a political election or how to make bran muffins, or what type of bullet does the best terminal ballistics, guess what? Fundamental attribution error: just because I'm an expert in human behavior does not mean I've got a great marriage or my kids love me or I know how to drive a car in traffic. You see what I'm saying? That's the thing, right?

That's, there's no better example of that than in the military. It's like, "Wow, I'm learning from this guy who really knows his stuff. He knows everything about it." And then he's like, "Let me tell you about dating." And you're like, "Huh, well, Gunny, you're on your fourth wife, so maybe, maybe not. Maybe, maybe I'm going to go get that, maybe I'm going to go get that that information."

His personal license plate on his Harley Davidson is "Marriage Risk," you know, spelled out with the ring. So...

No, we talked about a lot of that in one a couple episodes ago. And then even a little bit about range and randomness, because that's a central theme to what we're talking about. And we're trying to give, with our discussions on here, trying to give some examples to show, we're not—yes, we're oversimplifying some of it, but for the sake of action and for creating a bias for action—it's not oversimplified. But the idea is like, yeah, we're oversimplifying it, but we're not like that. That is the simple thing of someone standing up and going, "Oh, wait, no, I recognize this as something that's odd. I'm going to say something or do something." That's all these things take. That's all that 15-year-old kid did in Ohio and said, "Well, this is seems pretty serious. Now I should probably tell an adult." Like, you saved lives. You know what I'm saying?

When it rises to a level that you're suspicious and your explanatory storyline indicates it's a likely MDCOA (Most Dangerous Course of Action), you've got to do something. You've got to do it first, and you've got to do it faster. The brass and the bodies are going to hit the floor. And I'll give you a personal example that happened on our way to Detroit just a couple of weeks ago. Shelley was taking me to the airport. We had a situation that it was stormy early in the morning, had to leave the house at 6:00. It's pitch dark. We're in the middle of nowhere. So before we left, because we took Joba with us to the airport, Shelley shut off all the lights because we don't need lights. There's nobody that lives up here but Alec and Barr and Moose, right? And you don't want to attract them anymore than you already do, exactly, because our heartbeats attract them, they smelled the blood. Well, you got those big cats, man, those tracks you saw, or those photos, I don't know if you're sharing those, but feel free to. So, Shelley's walking first down the stairs. She's got a purse in her left hand, her coffee cup, and now she's additionally carrying my briefcase. I'm carrying my big bag, yeah, and I've got the dog on the leash, and I'm behind her going down our wood steps in the dark. And so Shelley gets to the last step, which isn't the last step, steps off into, "Whoops, there goes gravity!" Thanks, Slim Shady. And she burns in.

And now, first of all, the fear of the dearest of all dear humans in my life hurting herself, right? And you know, Shelley did a soccer roll and popped up, "I'm fine!" But the idea was, what did we have? We had a nuanced event. She takes me to the airport all the time, but this one was with total darkness on cold, icy steps with the dog, and she was carrying items that she doesn't generally carry. Anytime you're in a nuanced or novel situation, you've got to slow time down. And guess what? We added a complexity of no light, no light or low light. So that changed the math, the algorithm, the standard just enough to make it a near-fatal incident. And people are going, "Near fatal?" Hey, falls can be fatal when you're 60, you get what I'm saying? And it's a number one cause, I think, of hospitalization in older people. I would think that and heart disease are way up there.

So, what am I trying to tell you? I'm trying to tell you that anytime that you're not in your rhythm, in your pattern—you talked about those people being at the top of their game. Folks, if you're listening to this, you know what it feels like when you're at the top of your game, whether it's bowling or eating or watching TV, whatever it is, right? But if you take yourself outside of that, and now there's yelling and people are running and the lights have changed or whatever else, you've got to expect that there's going to be a little turbidity. And that turmoil, that random encounter, could be fatal. So, if you don't MLCOA (Most Likely Course of Action) and MDCOA (Most Dangerous Course of Action), if you don't slow time down, gift the time and distance, if you don't engage in explanatory storylines, guess what? And you know what, Brian, I don't do that on my own. I work out better when I have a coach or a mentor or even watch "Sweating to the Oldies" on TV. You know, so I need to be trained. Education doesn't do it. I need to be trained in how to do those things.

So, we covered a lot in the episode. And you know, getting that—the thing about intuition and the way people use it. You want to call it—I mean, there's, I try not to get into semantic arguments about it unless it's a very specific, and we're in a domain where, narrow, you have to be wrong. But call it whatever you want: "the gut feeling" or "something felt off." That's what happens, and it recalls in every single one of these situations, you know, "Hey, I felt this." Or the one, the guy coming up to me, like after the first day of training, doing that, "Yeah, I feel, I got just kind of a gut feeling that my wife might be cheating on me, and could you help me figure this out?" And I was like, "Well, hello, my name is Brian, it's nice to meet you. If that's the first words out of your mouth when you're meeting me, I think you think you probably already know." But, you know, is that that, because we don't have to act on that very often in our lives, we, it becomes an even more powerful, you know, signal in my opinion, because if you're feeling that, and you are almost never in dangerous situations, then you should probably listen to that.

So, I always have to tell people the, "to the intervention, the what are you going to say, can you say something, sustained observation, ask a question, intervene?" is giving people the sort of confidence to do that in their environment and affect change within your area of operations, of where you're at in your world. You do that whether you think you do or not anyway. And that interaction of you and your environment is what makes things what, what makes things happen. That's what, that's why it's not random. It's an interaction of all of the players in the game and the environment, and that's, that's what it is. It's seemingly random, but it's, if I, if I just think everything is random, then I don't feel like I have any control over the situation. And so if I understand...

And that breeds anxiety. Exactly, exactly. So we're in a Möbius loop of misunderstanding. And the idea is that if we can describe and see evidence of entropy, then we understand that true randomness can't exist, okay? Because it's predictable. Entropy is predictable. And you just talked about confidence. I go the one step further: Training can take you from confident to competent.

Yeah, because that's the key, right? Competence in something, the more competent you are, the more confident you are to to use it. So that's double. No, I get what you're saying, I get what you're saying. Yeah, they, they, they feed that, that's the positive feedback loop you want.

So, the positive feedback loop you want is learning the Heimlich for the one time in your life that you're going to save a life. I don't do the Heimlich every day, and it's not an environment where we might do it three times this week, but I train every single year to make sure that I'm good at it, and I rehearse it. The same thing with understanding how and where an AED (Automated External Defibrillator) might work in being able to use it at that time. Brian, those are things that are so random and so rare in my personal experience, right? But that's what I need to be trained for. That's exactly where my training needs to go, not the repetitive rote memorization of block training over and over. You know, for what? Does that come from? Those come from fear, they come from anxiety.

That's how Old Tom got shot, remember? That's how they slid through the intersection and hit that bus full of kids. We always go to those extreme training events rather than go to the most likely. And the most likely is that seemingly random thing that's going to occur more and more often now. Why? Because life has changed, the world has changed. Same thing, there's always going to be threats, but threat prediction, Brian, and specifically understanding your intuition, man, that's where it's at. If you can do that, you're going to be happier in your life, and you're going to be safer, because you're at the end of the day, just like the article says, you're responsible for your own personal safety.

Yeah, that's a great spot to end on for this one. That you know that taking responsibility of your own outcome and the outcome of the situation that you're in is, you have, I think, a lot of people have a lot more power and a lot more say and a lot more voting power than they sort of realize sometimes, right? We, it's easy to fall back into that crowd and go, "Well, I don't, you know, no one else is doing anything," or "I don't know," or "I don't, it's not my responsibility," and "I've got these other things to do." But it's like, it's just not, it's, it's you, you have the ability to really change the outcome of a situation, no matter what that situation is. You always have options. The options might not all be good, right? But you, you have options, you know what I'm saying? And that's the way I try to approach this stuff with folks.

Absolutely agree. So, we covered a lot for the Patreon subscribers. Obviously, you'll get the article and some other stuff that we have on there that help support the episodes, and you can read through it. The photos and stuff make sense, especially if you're interested in that stuff, you'll kind of see how we break it down in there. And you can refer back to that, obviously. So I always tell people, check out the Patreon site. We've got more starting here pretty soon on there as well that we're going to be, we're going to be putting on there. So, it's growing. And for those of you who have been supporting us for a while, we obviously appreciate, and those new people have been signing up recently, we, you know, welcome, welcome to the party. Welcome. We're so happy.

Thanks for having us. And I appreciate your comments so far. And always, those folks can reach out if they want us to cover specific topics on here. So, on that, Greg, any kind of final, final words or final thoughts on this one?

Just remember, tuning into us sometimes is trying to jump on the carousel while it's spinning.

Yeah, that's true. Trying, we're going to get it up. I think so, more laser-focused, more deliberate about it. And it's hard to do that sometimes through this medium of talking, because it's not training. It's not like you're at a course where we can talk about whatever, whenever, and it makes sense in the context that we're in, and we always make the connection. So, for, you know, we're trying to make connections on here in a sense, right, to keep focus. But that's why we refer back to those specific cases and bring up similar incidents. Well, the incidents are seemingly not similar at all, but we pull out the similar elements of all of them. And that's the idea, the essence of the lessons learned. And the reason that we've added them to these podcasts is that the Lessons Learned always have a story within a story, within a fable, within a lesson. And that way, you can take any or all of it and use it in your on-duty roll call training, or you can take a little bit and change your life with just the one story and apply it to your own life. Or you can go back and read the first, Brian, the Patreon subscribers get a definite advantage because they actually get to read the article, review it, go back, you know, there's your peer review. But that's fun stuff.

Well, technically, that is, I mean, it is. That's what I'm saying. But what I like about it is, I use the same standard that people use to peer review. So, yeah, our Patreon subscribers said they liked it, so I mean, that's all, that's scientific, go by it. But you know what I'm trying to say, more, you get more through actually being able to read it and see the photos that were meant to go along with it. So, I can't wait for Episode 4, and I know that IITA is coming up real soon. Brian, you and I will be in St. Louis, presenting on Thursday and Friday of IITA in March. Very excited.

Yeah.

So, well, thanks everyone so much for tuning in. If you have any questions, reach out to us at thehumanbehaviorpodcast@gmail.com. And then, of course, like we said, there's a lot more on the Patreon. And don't forget that training changes behavior.